


Push Against Gravity

by gunpowdereyes



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-08
Updated: 2014-05-08
Packaged: 2018-01-24 01:21:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1586441
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gunpowdereyes/pseuds/gunpowdereyes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Your forgiveness ain't a neighbourhood that I'm looking to live in.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Push Against Gravity

**Author's Note:**

> Set over the course of the 2005-06 Ottawa Senators season and structured around the Matthew Good Band album "The Audio of Being." Originally published June 2010.

**TRIPOLI**  
  
 _Must have lost my mind  
When I lost the car keys  
On my way out  
Strange how you're not with me_  
  
  
And just like that, somewhere between an inhale and an exhale, Marian is gone.  
  
Ignoring it is harder than Marty thought. His one lifeline, his one hope -- to bury himself in hockey, to not come up for air until June -- is gone. The rest of them move on effortlessly, or so it seems. The rest of them talk as if Heatley invented the tactic of scoring goals to win games. Marty tries to fuck this affection out of Jason, but to no avail. "He didn't know it would be here," Jason reasons. Marty says, "he knew it would be somewhere." But they both know Marty wouldn't have given a shit about anyone, anywhere else.  
  
It rains when he visits Atlanta. They go out anyway, Marty ruining four-hundred-dollar shoes and Marian's pants splattered by a passing bus. They talk about architecture; Marian pretends he's become an expert, and Marty lets him. They talk about football and the exorbitant price of shitty cheeseburgers. They talk about Marty's flight back, and Marian decides that they should get to the airport a few hours early, just to be safe.  
  
Marty comes home with sleeplessness pricking his eyes and turns his phone back on to listen to the dozen messages. Two from his agent, one from his mother, two from Fratelli's, six from Jason. One from Antoine. He slides his thumb thoughtfully over the keypad, then calls Jason back.  
  
"You're acting like a 14-year-old girl," Marty tells him -- seriously, because it's real advice. "Don't. They're miserable for a reason."  
  
===   
  
**ADVERTISING ON POLICE CARS**  
  
 _A bitter pill, is it better still  
To lay undone your guts for show?  
To reconstruct some of your bones?  
To turn it up?  
When it calls to you will you wake up?_  
  
  
Dany acclimates quickly. Everyone in this town is excited to see him. Dany wakes up at two in the morning with bile rising in his throat, but no one needs to know that. _Fresh start, fresh start_. The words etched into him, leaving a fine dust over the world that was.  
  
Dany buys a coffee and watches the skaters on the canal. Families and couples; laughing friends falling into and over each other, just because they can. So much perfection, pulling at something inside of him, some vital organ that has come loose. Sometimes he shifts just so and is sure that he's been rearranged from the inside.  
  
Dany goes through the motions. Writes his name again and again. Doesn't dream. He thinks he'll start talking to himself one of these days, to chase off the silence.  
  
He meets Jason, Ray and Gratts for lunch. He watches as Jason carefully assembles greens and protein, while Ray and Brian steal onion rings from each other's identical cheeseburger plates. Watches with interest as Ray shoots a darkly significant look at Jason, who pretends not to notice, while Brian chatters on about running into Antoine and Marty last night.  
  
Dany wakes and reminds himself to get up. He reminds himself to get a drink of water. He reminds himself that it's Thursday, that they play Tampa tonight, that he needs to get his grey suit cleaned before they go back on the road, that there's leftover Chinese in the fridge, that he's out of bread.  
  
He checks the calendar on the fridge. The game's against Montreal. Not even fucking close.  
  
===   
  
**I, THE THROW AWAY**  
  
 _Made a mess out of me  
A killing machine  
Sometimes when I need them  
If I look hard enough to see them, I can find my feet  
As I push against gravity  
In and out of having them been led by defeat  
So one more time's all I need_  
  
  
No one can help need, but it's wasteful to want. Antoine tries not to do it. His mother taught him not to be selfish.  
  
Jason was a problem from the beginning. Too cheerful, too friendly, too close in the backs of cabs, on bus rides; too helpful, navigating bar tabs and road towns and post-game wardrobe, patiently translating plays on the bench into understandable English. Jason with his conspiratorial, I-could-have-anyone-but-I-want-you grin. Antoine wanted him before he knew which way was up. Got him. Wins turned to drinks turned to Jason's arm around him, one step past casual -- flash -- alone in a bedroom, tangled slick-hot frantic -- flash -- sleepy morning, and Jason awake, smiling, so warm. Jason, who came on so fast and easy that it was impossible to avoid him. Who put something within Antoine's grasp then that can't be reached now. Won't. A beginning that he won't allow. The critical piece of him that’s snapped free left a clean break, and all of Jason’s probing won’t make him want it back. He suspects that it was never really there in the first place.  
  
They haven’t stopped fucking. Antoine should kill it, he knows; should get a new roommate and stop taking the calls (and making calls, middle of the night, dead drunk and longing). It wouldn’t be as hard if Jason wasn’t so firmly, unexpectedly entrenched. He doesn’t protect himself, seems to step off the ice and forget that it’s important to keep his guard up. He lays himself bare, offers everything. Antoine decides what to take. He isn’t proud of himself – he hopes that counts for something.  
  
Now they sit here with safe distance between them, killing time with a stupid movie, listening to Schubie and Meszaros bickering on the couch. They turn reflexively to smile at each other, and when the look holds a beat too long, Jason's eyes edge away from Antoine's, nervous.  
  
Sometimes he wishes he was capable of that fluttering emotion that pulls at Jason -- that makes him guileless and uncertain. Just to know how it feels.  
  
Long hours later they fall into bed. Jason likes to talk afterwards, and after planning his breakaway move for tomorrow's game and pestering Antoine for help with his keeper league, he suddenly asks if Antoine remembers the time in Bingo when they got so drunk on tequila that they fucked on the front lawn. Antoine remembers; the grass stains never came out of his shirt. Jason's hot skin and searing kisses and restless hands. The shadow behind the curtains next door, disappearing just as suddenly. The wild thrilled gleam in Jason's eyes when Antoine only laughed and pulled him closer. Antoine closes his eyes and says, "oh yeah. I forgot that was with you." Jason doesn't ask any more questions.  
  
Antoine has learned to forget that he was fourteen before his big growth spurt. Before that he was one of the smallest kids on his teams; easy to shove around, easy to ridicule. He got faster. If they couldn't catch him, they couldn't beat him.  
  
===  
  
 **TRUFFLE PIGS**  
  
 _I'm not myself  
But somehow I'm still being him_  
  
  
Mornings come on too early for Marty. Today his phone has no messages, which is doubly unsettling when Jason takes him aside, says "Hoss is all right" as if it wasn’t really in question. "Called him this morning." Jason's eyes follow Antoine across the room as he talks, and some part of Marty is sorry. The rest of Marty is sorry for Jason. Antoine is an irreversible mess. Antoine reminds Marty of Marty sometimes, but better not to think about that.  
  
Somewhere between where he is and where he would like to be, Marty is starting to feel like a ghost. He walks around the room and already feels like an intruder, already sees the difference in the way they smile at him. Except Heatley, who still welcomes him with feverish enthusiasm. Marty is too tired to care what this means, and besides, everything mutes with time. He only wants to punch out Heatley half the time, these days.  
  
Marty wants . . . and here he stops, because what is it? To play? Here? Yes, but. So many paths have closed. There are so many thoughts he can no longer afford to have.  
  
He ignores it all and loses himself, on autopilot in his life behind a life, so that when Antoine avoids his eyes and follows Marty home from the dark, dank bar, he feels no sympathy. He feels nothing but pleasure, sharp and fleeting.  
  
How can Marian be okay? There's no room to be okay in a world short on ground, oxygen, reason.  
  
===  
  
 **(LOST IN THE LAW OF AVERAGES)**  
  
Ray watches Dom prepare, the wily old man at once eager to pass on wisdom and above doing so. Ray likes him, feels at home with the eccentricity. Ray forgets all of them any time he pleases -- even Jason, even Brian. Hockey is just there; it doesn't thrum under his skin the way it does for most of them. Ray isn't a hockey player, he's just a man who is good at hockey.  
  
Schubert and Meszaros swear up and down that they fell into bed with two girls and a bottle of tequila one night in November. This holds little weight when a quarter of the team –- including, to Andrej’s intense mortification, Zdeno -- piles into their room the next morning to see whether or not they’re dead (and if not, if they’re coming for breakfast) and instead find them distinctly alone and still sound asleep, half tangled and all naked. They never give up on this story –- the girls must have left, they obviously stole the tequila, Christoph might even be missing a beloved shirt –- and never admit that they initially went to bed with a bag of M&Ms and _Die Hard_ on TV.   
  
Daniel wonders what the fuck to do with a team increasingly overrun with reckless confidence, Dominik Hasek, and lovesick children.  
  
Volchenkov wonders what the hell "commitment issues" are and resolves to live in ignorance.  
  
===  
  
 **THE FALL OF MAN**  
  
 _I look in your eyes  
You look for some teeth  
Like nickels at night  
Left under the sheets_  
  
  
A last-minute loss to Boston is in the books, and Jason walks to his stall, weary. He watches Antoine talk to the one lingering French reporter, watches him smooth a crease from his jacket and tie his shoes carefully. He watches the dark light in his eyes when Jason asks if he wants to pick up dinner, and he thinks he sees pity. Or maybe it's a trick of the light. He takes it back before Antoine can invent some excuse that isn't meant to be believable, and he finds Marty in the hall, staring blankly down the tunnel as if waiting for hope to spring out and surprise him. Jason approaches him with a smile.  
  
"Chinese?"  
  
Marty blinks at him. "I thought you went out with Ray."  
  
"That was last night." Jason's brow wrinkles. "He left with Gratts. What does that have to do with anything? We can get Thai instead, I don't care, I know a good place."  
  
"Ray left a while ago, that's why . . ." There's something like apology in Marty's voice. "Tomorrow night? I'm waiting for . . ." Jason stares at him, then shakes his head.  
  
"Sorry. Yeah, tomorrow. No problem."  
  
He wishes he had Antoine's steeliness, that calm disregard. Something, anything, to place between himself and this -- to absorb the blow or deflect it, blunt it or slow it -- anything not to _feel_ this much.  
  
He goes back to the hotel room, which they still share. It’s strange that Antoine doesn’t stay elsewhere -- doesn’t even seem to be slipping away, though he tastes foreign all the time now. It makes him wonder . . . but no. He's tired of wonder. He's tired of hope. He's good at hockey, and hockey is where he sets his sights, when he can help it.  
  
He still dreams, which he can't help. In the sharp colours of memory, Antoine taking his hand. Antoine asking to stay the night. Full pressure in his chest, terror and hope, and blinkfast moments that couldn't have been lies. He keeps himself awake -- calls friends back home, rereads magazines, screws around on his laptop. The weather lady drones on in the background. 20 centimetres of snow, just in time for Christmas. Jason flips the channel before she elaborates, settles on a home improvement show. Maybe it's time he learned to create.  
  
Antoine comes in late and gets into the other bed, avoiding Jason's eyes. It's funny, Jason thinks, it's strange; for someone getting so much of what he wants, he looks miserable.  
  
In the morning, Jason expertly finds the shower's balance between skin-blistering hot and bitter cold. He watches his purple and blue bruises take on a sickly greenish hue in the bathroom's fluorescent glare. He starts when the curtain moves, Antoine stepping in to join him, reaching past him for shampoo, saying nothing. Jason watches him a moment, then follows his lead. Antoine's progressed to soap by the time Jason is through, and as he tries to step out, Antoine grabs him, slippery fingers curled hard around his wrist. Shoved against the back wall, Jason too surprised to resist, hands coming to the back of Antoine's head, to his waist. Antoine pulls back, breathing hard, and stares at Jason, chin tipped up defiantly. Maybe challenging, maybe asking for something, maybe defending himself before Jason raises a protest. Jason knows even now, even with his half-formed hopes and inexplicable conviction of the _rightness_ of this, that he'll never understand Antoine. He avoids the look and instead takes Antoine's shoulder, hears the sharp intake of breath as he pushes off the wall and turns Antoine against it.  
  
They don't talk until that night, when Antoine asks for a towel, deep into the second period.  
  
===  
  
 **UNDER THE INFLUENCE**  
  
 _Just want to be like we used to  
Under the influence_  
  
  
Marian talks to Alfie. Alfie, and Phillips, and Schaefer, and sometimes Fish. Jason all the time, Jason with his total lack of subtlety, telling stories of streaks and pranks and victories, trying to make him forget home and instead making him long for it. Marty's only called once since his visit, drunk, music pounding in the background.  
  
He meets new people for coffee, for drinks, for a bad movie in a packed theatre. No good. A voice left in his head, laughing at stupid jokes, getting quiet in uncomfortable moments. He misses things he has no business missing.  
  
Sometimes he wakes up fumbling for his whereabouts. He supposes it's one of those things that will dull with time; upside-down with his world on its head, he will surely feel his feet under him, sooner or later. But for now, he thinks the glasses are in the wrong cupboard, the dresser is on the wrong side of the room, the windows are all oddly left of where they should be, the numbers hanging in the stalls at the rink are disordered. The city moves backwards in its strange rhythm.  
  
The problem is, Marty's voice is thin from this distance, a high note in it -- guilty about something, no doubt. Marty never seemed to learn that he didn't owe Marian anything, apologies or otherwise.  
  
When Marian dreams, Marty has absurd bleached blond hair and a smile so bright it hurts to look directly at him.  
  
The problem is, this team is still Heatley's. They loved him, they owned him. They stare wistfully at Marian, reliving the bright days when Ilya and Dany were ready to run this town.  
  
Ottawa is Heatley's, too.  
  
===  
  
 **THE RAT WHO WOULD BE KING**  
  
 _I imagined ashes  
And us alone, always us alone  
  
And I've waited on the sidelines all this time  
And I've a grenade with our names scratched on the side  
Well that's just love, and you know that love's not enough_  
  
  
Jason remembers Binghamton. Together on the blue couch in Pothier's apartment, for the moment safe and alone. Pothier's passed out down the hall, and long experience (and a memorable road roommate story of Ray's involving two girls and a broken bed) proves that he'll stay that way until noon. They are long motionless, boneless and for the moment satisfied, but Jason hears the too-quick breath entering and exiting Antoine's lungs, feels it; feels it too in his own chest. Antoine curls into him as they watch the neon numbers on the VCR tick over, not talking, but solidly in contact.   
  
Jason feels flushed with something he doesn’t quite recognize, something warm creeping through his limbs, spread from his chest. He is suddenly aware of the places Antoine fits against him, skin on sticky skin. Suddenly aware of how right it feels.  
  
Antoine stirs, rolls carefully to face him (experience proves that Pothier's hardwood floor HURTS, and is probably extremely unsanitary to boot), smiles. "Hey."  
  
"Hey," Antoine says. "We should move." But he curls closer, tangling limbs with Jason's, and parts of Jason will be numb in a couple of hours, but that's okay.  
  
"Sounds like a good idea," Jason says, and closes his eyes.  
  
===  
  
 **ANTI-POP**  
  
 _Give it up and they'll love you for it  
Give them blood and they'll love you for it_  
  
They stand at centre ice, an uneven line of the Senators’ imminent Olympians, and are saluted by the hometown crowd. Jason tries to drink it in, feeding off of Wade’s stoicism and Meszaros’s exuberance in equal measure. They’ve said all the right things about focus and priorities, but Jason knows that they’ve all been counting down to this in their heads; their hearts. He imagines what it will be like to step onto the ice in Torino, the maple leaf on his chest and the country on his back. It doesn’t even matter if he plays or not. This is right, this is _his_ , and no one can take it away from him.   
  
So the Olympics come and go, at once a breath of life and a death knell. Alfie has his gold and Meszaros is giddy with the experience, but Hasek is broken and won't quite meet anyone's eyes, leaving a curl of dread to take shape in all of them. When Antoine calls Jason with no clear idea of what to say, he doesn't pick up. Jason seems tired, sadder, when they reconvene at practice, but he doesn’t want to talk about it –- or talk much at all, for the moment. In some ways Antoine is grateful. For the past two weeks he's felt restless in a way that can only be trouble, and Jason's silence gives him time to crush it.   
  
And Ray? Now Ray’s going to start in the playoffs. Even he knows they’re fucked.  
  
===  
  
 **THE WORKERS SING A SONG OF MASS PRODUCTION**  
  
 _There's a fake part of me that comes off so you can read  
I was made by the Taiwanese in Taiwan_  
  
  
They make it through the first round with a minimum of disaster. Marty's return is triumphant, all easy grace and killer goals. One night Jason scores a goal so hot that Antoine wants to jump him right there on the ice; practically does, can't wait to get him back to the room, but Jason ducks out of dinner early and disappears. Antoine returns alone, turns on the TV, takes out a book, doesn't think about what Jason's doing. Doesn't wait up, just can't get to sleep.   
  
Jason comes in just before dawn, careful and quiet until Antoine gets up to meet him. Antoine doesn't know what to say, so he says nothing. It feels as if Jason's peeling away his skin, searching underneath. Antoine lets him look, because there's nothing good to see. Nothing there but ashes. Jason steps closer. All of a sudden he doesn't look as if he's in love. He looks . . . Antoine can't grasp it because Jason kisses him, but he tastes like the end.  
  
The team goes out en masse when the series ends. Ray has four girls in tow and keeps a drink for each hand -- he says he deserves it, and none of them can argue with that. Jason and Antoine walk into each other when Jason arrives, and awkwardness settles like a memory between them. Jason doesn't apologize anymore, Antoine notices. He's cracking. Gone the cockiness, gone the heart-in-hand openness, gone his faith that this time will be different. He's strangely hollow without it. He's strangely ordinary, this shuttered shell of Jason. But he must be so much better off.  
  
And when the rest of the team piles in, Jason moves away. Antoine, increasingly drunk, watches him, trying to identify the twisting-sinking in his stomach as Jason drapes an arm around one of the girls Ray's brought. He introduces her when Antoine approaches -- Kristi (who spells her name upon introduction) -- and Antoine realizes that Jason isn't trying to hurt him or bother him or make him jealous. This is his attempt at forward motion.  
  
Heatley moves easily through the crowd, his abrupt laughter echoing over the music as Schubie tells an elaborate story replete with eyerolls and hand-waving. Jason, on the outskirts of this circle, smiles when Kristi lifts to her tiptoes to speak to him.  
  
Antoine remembers sharing a flask on the back step of that ugly place in Binghamton, Jason's jokes worsening by the mouthful, the trees shedding their bright dead leaves. The crisp air and how he'd relished Jason's cold hand on his thigh, comfortable, slowly warming. Jason's stories about being a kid in such a light came out in the mundane: the Leafs cake for his tenth birthday, oversleeping the day after the Rangers beat Vancouver because his father let him watch until it was over, road hockey late into the longest nights of summer. Stories they all have, but Jason shaped them vividly, so Antoine tasted the blood smeared on his mouth, felt the slick beaten pavement of July under his feet, heard the scrape-slide of net as they set up their games. Fell.  
  
Realized that Jason was just like him, just like every other kid with a dream. And had hated him for it.  
  
Kristi doesn't last past the third round of drinks, but Antoine is no longer there to notice.  
  
===   
  
**SORT OF A PROTEST SONG**  
  
 _A robot heart for a robot boy_  
 _Who dreamed he was a lion_  
 _Our lives in these empty spaces aside_  
  
 _And I'm tired of walking around with my hand on my gun_  
  
Another season is over, another assortment of bottles on the table in the back room of another shady club. A light in the back corner is blinding, the fixture broken and the naked bulb exposed. Antoine shifts to keep it behind Marty, who now glows at the edges. Jason attempts to spin a quarter; tries and fails, tries and fails. They drink in silence, as if they're weirdly suspended, as if they exist on a time delay. Meszaros shows up with Chara and Schubert, and the effect slips away.  
  
Dany walks in late, carrying exhaustion so complete that he feels bent from the tight-wound coil at the base of his neck, the ache spreading down his spine. He has spent the past hour staring at his shoes, giving stock answers to questions that he didn’t hear.   
  
Marty slips out early and goes home, alerting no one to his departure. He books a flight to Prague before he even takes off his coat and shoes, sorry and surprised to find that he’s relieved to be alone.  
  
Antoine asks Jason to dance, and Jason stares at him a moment before shaking his head. A beer later he agrees, but his hands settle lightly on Antoine's waist, as if one of them might leave at any moment. Jason looks tired and his eyes are wary, but not with this loss -- not entirely. With a start Antoine realizes that this is what he's done to Jason. He sees his reflection in the tension in Jason's shoulders, the way he’s third-guessing himself, and an apology rises in his throat but won't form. What's he sorry for, anyway? What he did to Jason, or what he's denied himself? A question best unanswered, but as this moment closes around them, he's desperate to know.  
  
"I don't know what to do," Antoine says. Looking Jason in the eye takes an effort that's almost painful.  
  
"Why do you have to do anything?" Jason asks.  
  
"Because . . ." Because he wants to. Because maybe he's been assembled wrong, because maybe Jason isn't the answer -- or maybe he wasn't ever part of the problem. But one of them is wrong -- has been for a long time -- and he doesn't know which anymore or even which he hopes for. "Because I'm tired."  
  
Jason says nothing, but takes Antoine’s hand. The song changes as they head for the exit.


End file.
